Lacking
by pinkdigi
Summary: She never said she’d be waiting. [HG oneshot, postHBP]


**Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter**

**Lacking  
**—

It's a Muggle photograph, so she rips it in half and then into fourths.

But it doesn't matter.

_He _is the one who tore them apart.

—

Her mum finds it in the rubbish bin and uses her magic to put it back together.

_You might want to hold onto this_. _You never know_.

When her mum is gone, she tears it up into eighths.

—

She won't hold onto the hope that he will return.

She can't.

—

He comes home almost two years to the day he left, and he looks no different, but she has trouble recognizing him.

He's taller, and that spot on his shoulder where she used to rest her head is too high for her to reach now.

—

He is free now. Free from Horcruxes and Voldemort and responsibility in general.

Not everyone made it through the Final Battle, though.

He spends his first night as a free man in the hospital with his substitute family, sitting at his substitute father's side.

And then Arthur finally lets go and slips into the darkness that he, himself, has only narrowly avoided so many times in his life.

She turns her back and leaves the room, and he follows her.

—

He isn't a virgin, and when he pushes into her, he discovers that neither is she.

It's fast and desperate and everything he's ever been missing in his life.

And when it's over, when she goes to leave and he grabs her hand, it is then that he notices the ring.

—

He told her he'd come back.

She _never_ said she'd be waiting.

—

He doesn't understand how he can destroy Voldemort and can kill every Death Eater that cross his path with nothing but a wand (and sometimes not even that), but he cannot bring himself to look at her as she stands in the corner and whispers with Hermione.

He is so fucking pathetic.

—

She looks beautiful today, which means nothing to anyone anymore, because she always looks beautiful.

Glamour Charms hide her frown lines, the ones he gave her back when she still cared enough about him to be disappointed.

She has changed so much since her fifth year, but when he looks at her, that is still what he sees. He sees the old Ginny, the one who used to light up when he came into a room and used to skive off Potions to spend time with him out by the lake on sunny days.

Sometimes, he thinks he is the only person who sees that. Who sees _her_.

And he wonders if maybe the others all do, but they're too afraid to say anything.

Maybe he's the only one who liked the old Ginny better.

—

He used to think that she could save him.

But he knows now that if she is ever going to save him, he will have to save her, first.

And he can't.

—

Her mum tells her that she's glowing.

She's not. Her skin is just as pale and as freckled as ever before.

She looks in the mirror and tries to remember how she got to this place.

She can't.

—

They're down to the wire now, and they need to get going or they'll all be thrown horribly off schedule.

This is her last chance to back out.

She hesitates just a moment, and he isn't the only one who picks up on it this time.

_Do you really want to do this_? her best friend asks.

More hesitation.

_Yeah_.

A sigh.

_Ginny _–

_Hermione_.

A shared look, and then a sigh – this time from the older girl.

—

Her eyes used to sparkle.

Now, they are dull. They never meet his directly.

And when they do, they are searching, asking a question to which he has no answer.

He isn't even sure that he understands the question.

—

He should talk to her. He should take her in his arms and tell her that he loves her and make her break it off with that git.

But he won't.

No – he _can't_.

There is a difference between the two.

He needs to stop thinking that he can control her – the he has any say in her life.

He doesn't.

—

He realizes, as he takes her arm in his, that this is really going to happen.

He has told himself over and over again that it wouldn't, that she was going to see how wrong this was. That she would turn to him and they would run and they would never look back, not even once.

But she can't.

And he hates her for that.

—

They walk down the aisle and everything is as it should be.

But then he lets her go, and she steps forward toward the man she is about to marry.

And maybe, if she wasn't looking at this bloke the way she used to look at him, it wouldn't be so damn hard to just smile and take his seat beside Ron.

—


End file.
